He Never Planned to Become a CIO: Career Growth, and Leadership | Chris Driscoll

Chris Driscoll’s conversation with Bob Hansen is less a victory lap than an argument for paying attention to the work that is already teaching you something. Driscoll did not set out with a CIO title in mind. As an undergraduate in the mid-1990s, he encountered a university environment that was experimenting with the early internet, email and websites; that exposure, rather than his academic major, drew him toward technology. His original field was occupational safety and environmental health, and he describes changing majors several times. The point is not that credentials do not matter. It is that experience can reveal an aptitude before a career map does.

That discovery accelerated because the campus job was substantive. Driscoll began as a student worker and ultimately managed the university’s student-employee program. The work made management tangible: finding people, dealing with unreliable attendance, making decisions, developing ideas, securing resources and following through. In his telling, the university was a compact, complicated operating environment with many of the systems and competing needs of a small city or company. That practical setting made higher-education IT feel like a fitting long-term home, particularly because the work could support education and help people find their direction.

The leadership story that follows is deliberately people-centered. Driscoll says that every new institution required him to learn its business, history and priorities. Over time, he came to see leadership as less transactional and more about strategic partnerships—with colleagues, senior leaders and vendors. Technology remains the tool, not the objective. Its value is in helping the school or business work more effectively and solve a real problem; novelty by itself is not a sufficient reason to adopt it.

This principle shapes how he describes hiring. In higher education, he looks for people who pair technical skill with an affinity for the institution’s mission and community. He emphasizes that a leader’s job is not simply to pick a team and direct it, but to give capable people room to bring forward ideas and remove the obstacles that block useful work. He also makes a needed distinction: not every effective contributor wants or should be pushed into leadership. Opportunities should be available to those who want them, but effectiveness is a valid outcome in its own right.

Driscoll’s view of mentorship is similarly practical. A formative influence was a supervisor whose thoughtful recruiting made a long-distance move feel personal, clear and consequential. Driscoll contrasts that experience with impersonal, high-pressure interview processes and says he carried the observed practices into his own recruiting. He does not frame his development as a neat sequence of formal mentors. Much of it came from watching how effective executives built buy-in, communicated an initiative and found the resources to execute it. Later, an executive CIO program gave him more structured exposure to peers and mentors in complex organizations, reinforcing the importance of continued learning and a professional network.

The episode’s career advice has an edge: comfort can become stagnation. Driscoll says he has moved to the next opportunity before boredom diminished his ability to contribute, generally after leaving a role in a sound condition for a successor. That does not mean moving for movement’s sake. He stresses that there are no shortcuts, that experience must be earned, and that calculated risk works best when paired with continuous development. Education, certificates, outside interests, volunteering and, when feasible, geographic mobility broaden the perspective from which leaders judge opportunities and commitments.

The final part of the discussion shifts from career formation to the current challenge of AI in higher education. At La Roche, Driscoll says an already-planned curriculum refresh is enabling AI to be incorporated across courses, but not uniformly or uncritically. Students need to understand effective and ethical use because AI literacy will matter in the job market. At the same time, assignments must preserve actual learning; handing all intellectual work to a tool defeats the purpose of education. The answer described is policy, context-specific assignments and a measured institutional approach rather than either prohibition or indiscriminate adoption.

That approach also requires faculty development. Tools and online resources alone will not make every instructor fluent, and examples that work in one discipline may not transfer to another. Driscoll describes the need for program champions, practical use cases, workshops and a longer-term effort to bring faculty along. He also notes a more immediate technology obligation: strengthening aging core infrastructure. AI is exciting, but it cannot be allowed to eclipse foundational work or trigger premature investments. The conversation closes on a useful synthesis: career growth and institutional innovation both require curiosity, patience, informed risk and a clear sense of what the work is ultimately for.